CERN Accelerating science

The AWAKE project at CERN is planned to study proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration. The proton beam from the SPS will be used in order to drive wakefields in a 10 m long Rb plasma cell. In the first phase of this experiment, scheduled in 2016, the self-modulation of the proton beam in the plasma will be studied in detail, while in the second phase an external electron beam will be injected into the plasma wakefield to probe the acceleration process. The installation of AWAKE in the former CNGS experimental area and the required optics flexibility define the tight boundary conditions to be fulfilled by the electron beam line design. The transport of low energy (10-20 MeV) bunches of 1.25·10⁹ electrons and the synchronous copropagation with much higher intensity proton bunches (3E11) determines several technological and operational challenges for the magnets and the beam diagnostics. The current status of the electron line layout and the associated equipments are presented in this paper.